Beekeepers MaryEllen Kirkpatrick (left) and Deb Wandell (Chronicle Home & Garden Editor), combine the remaining bees from a queenless hive with the robust hive on the Chronicle's rooftop garden. A piece of newsprint keeps the bees separated, giving them time to chew through the barrier and acclimate.

Photo: Meredith May

Beekeepers MaryEllen Kirkpatrick (left) and Deb Wandell (Chronicle...

Image 3 of 3

An empty queen cup on a barren honeycomb frame shows that the dying colony is desperately trying to replace their lost queen.

Photo: Meredith May

An empty queen cup on a barren honeycomb frame shows that the dying...

Going into our first winter with bees on top of The Chronicle building, we knew our colonies would slow down. They don't hibernate, per se, but they gather in a cluster inside the hive to stay warm, and don't fly out and forage if it's rainy, windy or too cold. The queen lays fewer eggs.

In colder climates beekeepers have to wrap their hives with insulated blankets. Thanks to San Francisco's Mediterranean clime, and perhaps global warming, all we have to do is make sure to leave enough honey in the hive so the colony always has something to eat.

But one of our two hives was just too quiet. In November and December, only a handful of bees were entering and exiting the hive, compared with our second hive, which always had a small cloud of bees jockeying for passage through the slit at the bottom of the hive.

We looked inside the quiet one, and the honeycomb frames felt too light. No honey. No larvae. And we couldn't find a queen. Our worst fears were confirmed a few weeks later when San Francisco beekeeper MaryEllen Kirkpatrick stopped by in January to investigate. She took one look at the bees in the inactive hive and had a diagnosis:

"These bees are depressed."

They'd been without a queen so long they had lost their will, and you could almost tell by the way they walked lethargically over empty combs like lost souls. We could see they had constructed some queen cells in a futile attempt to raise a replacement queen from eggs they didn't have.

About this time, San Francisco State researchers broke news of a new bee killer - the phorid fly, which lays its eggs inside a bee's abdomen. When the larvae hatch, they devour the host honeybee from inside, and the bee has a nervous system meltdown and starts flying at night and headfirst toward lights. Once the bee is dead, the fly larvae hatch out of the bee's head.

As if the honeybee didn't already have it hard enough. The United States is losing about one-third of its honeybee hives a year, most of those over the winter. These losses are unsustainable. If they continue, they threaten not only the livelihoods of beekeepers and farmers but also everyone who eats strawberries, almonds, onions, broccoli, tangerines, coconuts, carrots, grapes and hundreds of other things in the produce section.

It's death by a thousand cuts: mites, moths, insecticides on crops and on seeds, and now this creepy fly. We collected several dead bees from the ground and kept them in a jar, and thankfully nothing hatched out of their heads.

More likely our hive failed because the queen was weak or sick, the colony didn't accept her or we accidentally squished her while checking the hives. We doubt she left with a swarm because we saw her in late fall, after swarming season, and if a swarm had taken off at Fifth and Mission streets in busy downtown San Francisco, we probably would have been alerted.

In any case, the hive was not viable and wouldn't make it through the winter.

We called our buddies at Google, who have four beehives painted in the company colors: red, yellow, green and blue. Donn Denman, a software developer and resident Google beekeeper, sympathized. They lost three hives this year. Blue lost the queen. Yellow failed a month after they took the honey out. Green appeared to have been invaded by mice.

Denman, who also keeps bees at his Los Gatos home, believes mites were the culprit. He mixes antibiotic with powdered sugar to keep mites in check at home, but Google, which favored a more natural approach, treated only one hive for mites. That's the one that survived.

"As a programmer, I love doing diagnostic work to find bugs in code," he said. "You can take a theory, test it and eventually have your answer. It's not the same with beekeeping. It's a much harder bug to care for."

Before we hung up, we both agreed to get more bees and try, try again.

With Kirkpatrick's help, we combined the sad Chronicle bees with the happy ones in hive No. 2 to try to lift their spirits.

And we placed an order through another San Francisco beekeeper, Diana Nankin, to bring us a new mated queen and bees, along with frames of capped brood and eggs, to start a new hive.

Come spring, we'll give it another go. Because facing a future without produce and nuts is even more depressing.

Keep the buzz going

Check out the Honeybee Chronicles on Facebook: Beekeeping: Honeybee Chronicles